Faith, Science And Nature's Mysteries

March 20, 2005|By J. Emmett Duffy Special to the Daily Press

Nature inspires awe and mystery. The intricate design in living organisms is obvious to even a casual observer.

Since the beginning of time, humans have been fascinated and humbled by this order in the natural world, and our quests to explain it have taken many paths. Many people find deep inspiration in their faith that the order of nature reflects the purposeful plan of God. Similarly, many, including both deeply religious and secular people, are drawn to the grand challenge of understanding nature's intricate workings through science.

Both perspectives have greatly enriched human experience. Sadly, in recent decades, the scientific and religious paths toward understanding have become increasingly estranged from one another. The flash point for this disagreement involves the teaching of evolution.

Biological evolution is the foundation on which all of the modern life sciences are built, the culmination of a revolutionary century of exploration, rigorous testing and synthesis. It is regarded by essentially all practicing biologists as the most fundamental, internally consistent and empirically well-supported body of explanation in the history of the life sciences.

Importantly, many world religions have also recognized this and issued formal statements supporting the validity of evolution. These include the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran World Federation, the United Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the American Jewish Congress, the Unitarian Universalist Association and others.

Recently, however, a vocal minority has accelerated a long-running campaign to uproot evolution from school science curricula because they perceive it as incompatible with the Bible. This strategy initially involved attempts to introduce overtly religious statements as scientific alternatives to evolution ("creation science"). But their nonscientific nature was transparent, and such attempts were consistently struck down by the courts, stimulating an evolutionary change (if I may use the term) in the anti-evolution battle plan.

The latest product of this process is the cleverly packaged concept of "intelligent design," or ID, which suggests that living organisms are too complex to have arisen incrementally via evolution, and therefore must have been designed with foresight by an intelligent power. ID is politically savvier than previous, versions of "creation science": Its proponents claim, at least in public, that it is not religious, and it eschews some of the more obviously indefensible claims of earlier creationist statements (e.g., a 6,000-year-old earth).

With its new clothes and superficial resemblance to a scientific theory, ID proponents are redoubling their efforts to inject their ideas into science classrooms, representing ID as a new scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution, and appealing to basic American values of fairness.

So what's the big deal? Why not give "intelligent design" equal time in science classes?

ID proponents like to claim that they are promoting critical thought. Although this argument seems suspiciously out of character from religious fundamentalists, it nevertheless sounds reasonable to a casual observer. After all, challenges to orthodoxy are how science progresses and what makes it healthy. Think Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein -- and, of course, Darwin.

But there is a fatal flaw in this argument when applied to "intelligent design." That is that, throughout history, challenges to scientific orthodoxy have succeeded by offering a testable alternative, a new explanation that scrutiny by skeptical parties proves to fit the data better than the old one did.

"Intelligent design" fails this test because it not only offers no alternative scientific explanation, it offers no scientific explanation at all. In a nutshell, ID argues that the workings of organic life are so complex that we not only don't understand them, we can't understand them.

There are two basic problems here. First, the premise is incorrect. It amounts to saying, "If I can't understand evolution, it must be wrong." But of course, many other people understand it perfectly well. The failure of ID proponents to comprehend organic evolution no more disproves the theory than my incomprehension at a 747 taking flight proves that air travel is a divine miracle. The more general problem is that intellectual laziness is not an alternative explanation.

The crux of this issue is the simple question of what science is. It is, simply, the systematic search for knowledge about the natural world in the form of evidence gathered by observation and experiment.

Faith is, by definition, acceptance that does not depend on empirical evidence.